Author
Topic: It's that simple! (Read 17876 times)

It has been a little while since I wrote anything, but our development team has been doing an amazing job in keeping you all up-to-date with recent changes, the most recent of which you can read about here. Today I want to talk about the changes made to Curve2. As an end user you probably won't detect these changes, but for theme authors and other people who love customizing their forums, they'll find this interesting.

One thing I have always loved about SMF is that it's flexible and it's easy to learn its template system. We are, however, going one step further and making it even easier. We have changed how you can create a button in SMF. In SMF 2.0 you have to use div/ul/li containers to create a button, but with latest changes you have the power to create a button through just using .button class. This means that you only need to use one of the most used html elements (such as div/span/a).

We have also changed the theme systematic a little bit more. This part is only for theme makers and customizers. In SMF 2.0 themes used table styling. Table styling is bit easier to use compared to div-styling, but when it comes to flexibility nothing can beat div-styling . Div-styling also allows us to use animations, especially from smc_toggle, from which we made a little bit combo, which you can see on #1592 (GitHub --thanks to live627). This allows our boards using smc_toggle to collapse. I'll not spoil all the details and fun here .

The latest development that I want to talk about is Half-Content (Halfling #1471) (many thanks to live627). This part is also not detectable by the end user, but if you are familiar with customizing/themes you surely see the stats page and/or similar pages, use left/right blocks. This change makes things more simple because you only need to use Half-Content class in your container to create left/right blocks. We are not limiting you to creating two blocks, you can change the width and create more blocks on same line, it's completely up to you.

We believe all these changes will allow our user base to edit their sites and create new pages more easily. These changes will also lead to SMF's template system becoming simpler to use. In addition, I estimate that more general CSS classes in the core software will result in fewer additions from modifications, which will lower the size of the CSS files and make your sites faster.

As always, you can track the changes at SMF2.1 GitHub repo and test it, and you can find useful information about how to set up a local install from the repository here at our wiki